Politicians Category

The Guardian has a few words on the Russian State-funded trolls accused of swinging the 2016 US Presidential election from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. Russia saw in Trump, so the allegation follows, a better chance to grow and protect its monocular, illiberal interests.

The Russian regime often looks guiltier than a dog stood by a pile of poo. When the Russian PR machine talks, you’d be wise to hold your nose. It’s a steady stream of bull-made effluent. And it makes you wonder why Russia’s tosh has been imbibed with such power. Did Russian bots and spods really win it for Trump, boost Bernie Sanders and root for the Green Party’s Jill Stein? Is its propaganda so much more effective than the stuff seeping from Western regimes? And why does any of it matter?

The Cold War was won. But look out – the Ruskies have moved on from invasion and armed global socialism to a fearsome social media strategy. They might not be able to hack United States military supercomputers and trigger World War III, but they’ve got some terrific gossip about Clinton having had on-the-clock sex with Trump on a yellowy waterbed as Saddam Hussein drummed out Back in the USSR on Bono’s buttocks. (That was the rumour, right? If not, Oleg, call me, I have ideas and hashtags.) Whatever the truth, mentally-negligible Mary-Sue in a swing state bought it.

The Guardian tell us:

It was from American political activists that they [Russian trolls] received the advice to target “purple” swing states, something that was essential to the ultimate success of the campaign.

Well, quite. You target the area where you can have most effect. You know, like the, er, Guardian did:

To maximise the likelihood of your efforts making a difference, we’ve zeroed in on one of the places where this year’s election truly will be decided: Clark County, Ohio, which is balanced on a razor’s edge between Republicans and Democrats. In the 2000 election, Al Gore won Clark County by 1% – equivalent to 324 votes – but George Bush won the state as a whole by just four percentage points. This time round, Ohio is one of the most crucial swing states: Kerry and Bush have been campaigning there tire lessly – they’ve visited Clark County itself – and the most recent Ohio poll shows, once again, a 1% difference between the two of them. The voters we will target in our letter-writing initiative are all Clark County residents, and they are all registered independents, which somewhat increases the chances of their being persuadable.

Before Twitter, there was the Guardian’s interventionism. Called Operation Clark County, the paper wanted to “help readers have a say in the American election by writing to undecided voters in the crucial state of Ohio”.

Here was one reaction from the mouth-breathing colonials:

KEEP YOUR FUCKIN’ LIMEY HANDS OFF OUR ELECTION. HEY, SHITHEADS, REMEMBER THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR? REMEMBER THE WAR OF 1812? WE DIDN’T WANT YOU, OR YOUR POLITICS HERE, THAT’S WHY WE KICKED YOUR ASSES OUT. FOR THE 47% OF YOU WHO DON’T WANT PRESIDENT BUSH, I SAY THIS … TOUGH SHIT!PROUD AMERICAN VOTING FOR BUSH!

How the modern Left loves democracy. You can intervene if is means sneaking the demos the right answer to the big question. Noble Obama telling us a vote for Brexit would put us to the back of the queue and helpful Bill Clinton backing Boris Yeltsin with $1bn of aid are great. But a Russian nerd in an out-of-town office tweeting bollocks is a threat to democracy – something so precious that its champions call everyone who voted for Trump and Brexit thick as custard.

So much for confidence in democracy. Because that’s it, no? It’s not about Russian might. It’s about us thinking our way of life is so precarious that a few rogue propagandists can destroy it with a tweet.

Who sets the news agenda that makes Israel the top story, China only newsworthy when our politicians are there for business and the allegation that Brendan Cox sexually harassed two women, a claim he denies, the lead issue on Sky and the BBC? Sky News led with Cox this morning on the telly, and the story is the second most vital on the BBC ‘s website, there after reaction to mass murder at a Florida school. And not that Cox (and, no, it’s not nominative determinism; he denies it) is the main thrust of his own story. The Beeb’s headline is: “Murdered MP’s widower Brendan Cox quits charities.”

The Telegraph pads it out, telling readers that Cox has quit two charities “set up in her memory after sexual assault allegations from his past resurfaced”.

Brendan Cox denied sexually harassing two women while he was married to the late politician, but accepted “inappropriate” behaviour, saying: “I made mistakes and behaved in a way that caused some women hurt and offence.”

Offence causing is a crime?

He has left posts at More in Common and the Jo Cox Foundation after the Mail on Sunday published accusations made by a former colleague while they both worked at charity Save the Children in 2015.

The Guardian hears from Jo Cox’s sister Kim Leadbeater, who says the family would “support Brendan as he endeavours to do the right thing by admitting mistakes he may have made in the past”. Mistakes he may have committed have been admitted to? Eh?

Well, it looks like they’ve had time to work it out because the Mail first reported the allegations in November 2015. Cox called them “untrue”:

Are they any more or less untrue now they’ve been repeated?

Labour MPs Yvette Cooper thinks some sort of justice has been served. “Hopefully we are seeing a change in climate and culture where people are recognising that those in positions of power should not abuse [those] positions,” Cooper told the Sky News programme Sunday with Niall Paterson.

And Labour MP Jess Phillips added – does she do anything other than talk to media? – “The fact of the matter is that it’s not enough just to say ‘oh, I’m sorry’. You have to show how you’re going to change the way you are in the future and I think Brendan, more so than many I’ve seen in this area, is actually trying to do that.”

One error and you need rewiring. How fair we are.

Public shaming of anyone who’s behaved “inappropriately” is a sad ambition. What happened to the rule of law and the right to defend yourself? When did the British wing of Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice start wathing us?

The country needs more and better housing. That much is certain. Demand outstrips supply. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and more legislation rooted in it have stymied house building and skewed the market.

And since the 1972-1973 building boom when around 300,000 new homes were constructed – the current supply is around 200,000 new homes; demand is 250,000; Chancellor Hammond says we need 300,000 – technology has improved.

The problem that Britain has, partly as a result of cultural and governmental promotion of ownership, is that renting is, objectively speaking, second best. You can currently pay more in rent than an owner would in mortgage interest

Well, quite. It’s also true that the landlord doesn’t only pay a mortgage. Properties need to be maintained. Estate agencies are dedicated to overseeing property care, and ensuring a place is occupied. It’s not all profit.

But none of that explains why homes are not being built. It’s not about rented or owned; it’s about the total number of homes. We need more.

The question is why with such a pressing need for homes, so much land remains protected by legislation. If building homes is the priority, it’s time to free up the market and in so doing allow more of the less well off the opportunity to own their own homes and not be beholden to the State.

Not done with trolling the US through Russia Today, the allegation is that Vladimir Putin meddled in the 2016 US election, chiefly backing Donald Trump in his against-the-odds victory over the pre-ordained Hillary Clinton. This week 13 Russians have been criminally charged with interfering in the 2016 US election. Also implicated is so-called “troll farm” the Internet Research Agency. A 37-page indictment alleges Russians were “supporting the presidential campaign of then-candidate Donald J Trump … and disparaging Hillary Clinton”.

Foreign entities interfering in US elections is wrong. Barack Obama would never do that.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, April 3— As President Clinton and President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia began their first summit meeting today, Mr. Clinton presented the Russian leader with some $1 billion in American aid programs intended to support Russian democrats and spur the Western allies to make Russian reform their top foreign policy priority.

Among the new or expanded programs in the package were loan guarantees to build apartments for demobilized Russian soldiers; loans for Russian entrepreneurs; medical supplies, food and grain assistance; funds to help the Russian Government sell state-owned industries, and technical advisers to help repair pipelines and oil wells and begin exporting again.

Mr. Clinton said the package was intended to help promote free-market skills on a grass-roots level in both Moscow and the Russian countryside, so the movement toward democratic reform would continue no matter who governs in the Kremlin.

Is it only criminal when we don’t like the outcome? Is democracy being damaged by Russian oligarchs or helped by foreign billionaires? Do we only like the obscenely wealthy foreigners meddling with democracy when they’re on our side?

No sooner has John McDonnell outlined his ambition to renationalise energy, rail and water than news reaches us of a shortfall. The Guardian notes:

Transport for London (TfL) has insisted it is not facing a financial crisis despite planning for a near £1bn deficit next year after a surprise fall in passenger numbers.

Mr McDonnell told BBC Radio 4’s Today earlier:

“It would be cost free. You borrow to buy an asset and when that asset is producing profits like the water industry does, that will cover your borrowing cost.”

The assets make the profits. The profits pay the bills. What about if people alter their behaviour?

He went on:

“We aren’t going to take back control of these industries in order to put them into the hands of a remote bureaucracy, but to put them into the hands of all of you – so that they can never again be taken away.”

But bureaucrats will still run the entity, albeit ones appointed by the State, right? Who are they accountable to? How does anyone get redress for poor service? Is McDonnell seeking to serve taxpayers best or just tying to give meaning, direction and authority to the State?

“Public ownership is not just a political decision, it’s an economic necessity. We’ll move away from the failed privatisation model of the past, developing new democratic forms of ownership, joining other countries, regions and cities across the world in taking control of our essential services.”

So you take over the London Underground, and budget accordingly. And then there’s a £1bn deficit. Which means..? As Ronald Reagan put it in 1986: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

But business has never been independent of the State. What of PPI, regulation and subsidies, which rather dampen the idea that immense profits are being made? (In 2006-7, the Government spent £6.8 billion of public money in the the privatised rail industry – around half what it cost to run the entire thing.) What of Government calls for curbs on executive pay and vows to “fix the broken housing market”? So much for the free market.

Tony Blair told us “Stability can be a sexy thing”. Theresa May wants to be “strong and stable”. They seek to maintain the status quo. Doesn’t that add up to the established businesses and their links to Government rolling on and on and not entrepreneurship, the best of which is often triggered by volatility and daring?

McDonnell’s monocular and forgetful call for re-nationalisation has not come out of the blue. It’s just an addendum to current and recent Government policy and a crisis of purpose.

Over the years, various countries have accused the world’s only Jewish state of using a variety of less conventional secret agents. To date, they have identified the following creatures as being Israeli spies:

A Falcon (Turkey)
A Dolphin (Hamas)
A Shark (Egypt)
A Eagle (Syria)
A Griffon Vulture (Saudi Arabia)
A Vulture (Sudan)
A Bee-eater (Turkey)
A Boar (Palestinian Authority)
A Hyena (Palestinians)
A Rat (Palestinian New Agency)
A Kestrel (Hezbollah)

Today brings news that the Israelis are in cahoots with lizards, naturally.

Hassan Firuzabadi, a former chief-of-staff of Iran’s armed forces and key advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, says Israel is using lizards to “attract atomic waves” and spy on his country’s nuclear program.

“Several years ago, some individuals came to Iran to collect aid for Palestine… We were suspicious of the route they chose,” he tells the ILNA news agency.

“In their possessions were a variety of reptile desert species like lizards, chameleons… We found out that their skin attracts atomic waves and that they were nuclear spies who wanted to find out where inside the Islamic Republic of Iran we have uranium mines and where we are engaged in atomic activities.”

Lizards, of course, are not spying for the Israelis. They are spying for their fellow members of the House of Windsor.

The use of sarin was Barack Obama’s “red line”. You can shoot, stab, and smash them with barrel bombs, but using chemical weapons to kill Syrians is bad.

The use of chemical weapons turned Syria’s embattled dictator Bashar al-Assad’s war against the rebels into a war crime. He must be stopped because it “is not just that President Assad might start using his chemical arsenal in much greater quantities… [but also] the prospect of it falling into even less benign hands.”

It’s not about ending the war in Syria; it’s about preventing us being next. It was also a connived argument against intervention – we only go if there are people being killed by poisoned gas. Starvation and a lack of medial aid for the critically ill exacerbated by armed blockades are morally superior ways to die.

There are no good choices — good outcomes in Syria are impossible to imagine. But if it is proved to a certainty that Assad is trying to kill his people with chemical weapons, then Obama may have no choice but to act, not only because he has put the country’s credibility on the line (Iran and North Korea are undoubtedly watching closely), but also because the alternative — allowing human beings to be murdered by a monstrous regime using the world’s most devilish weapons, when he has the power to stop it — is not a moral option for a moral man.

As Timenoted: “Rebels’ use of chemical weapons] could force Obama into the deeper engagement he has long resisted: the alarming prospect that radical Islamists could acquire Syrian chemical weapons and try to use them beyond Syria’s borders, perhaps even within the US.”

Just as Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction led us into Iraq, WMDs would pull us into action in Syria.

You might wonder if WMD gases are more potent than conventional method of mass killing, as one expert told The Register: “Far from possessing any special deadliness, chemical warheads are less potent than ordinary conventional-explosive ones. Calling them “WMD”, which suggests they are in some way equivalent to nuclear bombs, is simply ridiculous.’ He concluded: ‘So, if your aim is to kill and injure as many people as possible, you’d be a fool to use chemicals. And yet chemicals are rated as WMD, while ordinary explosives aren’t.”

But there is no time to pause and consider the facts. We are 45-minutes from certain death. We must go in now.

We never did find any WMD in Iraq. And now news reaches us that more big weapons have vanished in the Middle East. Newsweek reports:

Jeremy Corbyn is something of an expert on anti-Semitism – which given his role as leader of the Labour Party, ‘friend’ of Hamas and a former presenter on Iran’s Press TV is no great shock. Corbyn has spotted something anti-Jewish in the ranks of Tottenham Hotspur fans. No, he’s not swapping allegiances from Arsenal to Spurs. He wants Spurs fans to sing what he tells them to and stop cheering for the ‘Yid Army’.

He told the Guardian before Spurs and Arsenal played each other yesterday: “There has been racist abuse at past matches between Arsenal and Spurs – instances of antisemitism and homophobia. Yes, football fans get very passionate but that is not acceptable and not allowed.”

“Yid chants are unacceptable,” adds Corbyn. “It plays into something that’s not very good and we should be saying: ‘We’re the Spurs’ or ‘We’re the Arsenal’. Stick to your club; it’s your club that unites you. The idea of adopting a term to neutralise it doesn’t really work because it is identifying a club by an ethnic group or faith, whereas you should be identifying clubs through supporters.”

You might at this point suppose the Guardian has been duped by an arch-satirist. You’re looking for Shami Chakrabarti to pop up and say that she’s never heard a thing – and for Corbyn to nationalise Tottenham and install Dame Shami as the club’s new striker. But the real Corbyn is no fan of Yid Armies, so it is very probably him doing his bit for his core electorate.

The letter from the Polish League Against Defamation informed us: “There were only camps established by Germany in German-occupied Poland. The proper reference to the German camps therefore is as follows:

– German camps in German-occupied Poland

– German Nazi camps in German-occupied Poland

– German camps in Nazi-occupied Poland

– Nazi camps in German-occupied Poland.”

It is “gravely false and highly defamatory” to call the Nazi camps in German-occupied Poland “Polish death camps”, or any variant thereof.

Poland’s president Andrzej Duda has signed-off a law that that makes it criminal to suggest his country supported Nazi war crimes during the 1939-1945 occupation. The new law, he reasons, maintains Poland’s “dignity and historical truth”. If you call Auschwitz a “Polish death camp” you could be fined or imprisoned for three years.

“All the atrocities and all the victims, everything that happened during World War II on Polish soil, has to be attributed to Germany,” says Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. “We will never be accused of complicity in the Holocaust. This is our ‘to be or not to be’… This law is not going to limit speech, not even one iota.”

Germany is on side.

“Without directly interfering in the legislation in Poland, I would like to say the following very clearly as German chancellor: We as Germans are responsible for what happened during the Holocaust, the Shoah, under National Socialism (Nazism),” said Angela Merkel in her weekly video podcast.

German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel states: “This organized mass murder was carried out by our country and no one else. Individual collaborators change nothing about that. We are convinced that only carefully appraising our own history can bring reconciliation. That includes people who had to experience the intolerable suffering of the Holocaust being able to speak unrestrictedly about this suffering.”

But how can any law banning words and opinions enable unrestricted speech?

Peter Muchlinski, SOAS, University of London, UK, notes: “There are fears that the law would put virtually every Jewish survivor of the Holocaust in Poland at risk of prosecution. I’ve read hundreds of survivors’ testimonies, yet I do not recall a single one where the writer has not described an episode of betrayal, blackmail or denunciation on the part of their fellow Polish citizens.”

Is something more in this?

Poland’s lower house of parliament endorsed the new legislation on January 26, the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Why then?

Many Poles helped Jews during the war. They were brave and righteous. If caught, they faced execution by the Nazis.

Morawiecki was touring the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in Markowa when he spoke.

The Markowa museum, which opened in 2016, stands near the place where German soldiers in 1944 killed Jozef Ulma, his pregnant wife Wiktoria and their six small children, as well as eight members of the Goldman, Gruenfeld and Didner families that the Ulmas were sheltering.

Mateusz Szpytma, deputy director of the museum, said it is estimated that between 700 and 1,100 Poles were murdered by the Germans for helping Jews during the war.

At the Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance center in Jerusalem, 6,706 Poles are honoured for their role in helping Jews.

Facts are vital. But how are they established if not through free speech and free expression? It’s a perverted sense of liberty that advances freedom in negative terms – a freedom from ideas, speech and words, rather than the pursuit of a positive freedom to speak and to challenge. From “Arbeit macht frei”, the sick message that hung over the gate to Auschwitz, the message to today’s Poles is “Gesetz macht dich frei”, the law will provide.

Arkady Rzegocki, Polish ambassador to the UK, writes to the Times:

The new law does not set a precedent. Legislation penalising, for example, Holocaust denial is also reflected in the legal systems of other European countries.

Absurd, of course. Don’t try to understand why and how? Just dip the Holocaust in aspic and serve it as an orthodoxy to be consumed. Only bigots and berks deny the Holocaust and make liars of the millions murdered and everyone who knew them. That speech is trammelled on pain of law to protect the sane and reasoned from the foolish, biased and people who prefer the other side in the war is a sadness that undermines free speech, elevates the losers to something too close to martyrdom and presents Germans, French and anyone else living where Holocaust denial is a crime as mass-murderers-in-waiting, people for whom the Holocaust is not a horror but a neatly-packaged slice of history that were it not for banning orders most would consider an experiment worth revisiting.

You wonder who it is the authorities really hate and fear?

Rzegocki continues:

According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial, this is not only a denial that the Holocaust took place, but also a distortion of historical truth about its perpetrators and its circumstances. We believe that the truth about German death camps and the cruel reality of the German occupation of Poland is a part of the Holocaust’s history, and see the new law as complementary to the existing world regulation on Holocaust denial.

“World regulation on Holocaust denial”. To anyone who supports free speech, that line is chilling.

And now for some more context. The Guardian spots another landmark to Jewish persecution:

One lesser-known memorial is a small plaque on the wall of the Warszawa Gdańska railway station, a nondescript socialist-era building on the north side of the city. It was from here that many Poles of Jewish origin departed in the wake of the “anti-Zionist campaign” in March 1968, when cold war politics and a power struggle within the Polish Communist party led to an antisemitic propaganda campaign forcing thousands of Polish Jews to leave the country.

“Loyalty to socialist Poland and imperialist Israel is not possible simultaneously,” prime minister Józef Cyrankiewicz had declared in 1968. “Whoever wants to face these consequences in the form of emigration will not encounter any obstacle.” The plaque bears a tribute from the Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg: “For those who emigrated from Poland after March 1968 with a one-way ticket. They left behind more than they had possessed.”

And this:

Ruling party officials have claimed the row has been confected by Jewish advocacy groups seeking compensation for property restitution claims. An editorial on the rightwing TV Republika website described the crisis as “a big test of loyalty for the Polish Jews whose organisations are linked personally and institutionally with American Jews”, and accused them of “too rarely and too weakly defending Poland and the Poles in the international arena”.

“They want to break us – it’s about sovereignty, truth and money,” read the cover of Sieci, a weekly that has close ties to Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party.

DW adds:

Andrzej Zybertowicz, an adviser to Polish President Andrzej Duda, said Israel’s negative reaction to the law stemmed from what he called a “feeling of shame at the passivity of the Jews during the Holocaust.”

Zybertowicz called Israel’s opposition to the new law “anti-Polish” and said it shows the Mideast nation is “clearly fighting to keep the monopoly on the Holocaust.”

“Many Jews engaged in denunciation, collaboration during the war. I think Israel has still not worked it through,” Zybertowicz said in the interview in The Polska-The Times newspaper on Friday.

“‘Sex pest’ MPs to keep anonymity while under investigation over harassment claims,” says the London Evening Standard’s front page. It’s interesting stuff. Given that false and mistaken accusations can ruin lives, might not circumspection be right and proper? Does every victim want their claim and potential victimhood publicised, something that could leave them unable to move on with their lives?

Under new proposals drawn up by a cross-party committee, MPs ruled to have harassed staff will have to write a letter of apology and undergo training, be suspended or forced to face a public vote. At the moment, MPs don’t have any formal disciplinary procedures.

Helping readers to make sense of what is a thorny and important matter is Kate Maltby, the well-connected Tory activist. Maltby is the woman who alleged Damian Green MP made inappropriate advances towards her, including “fleetingly” touching her knee in 2015. She said he sent her a “suggestive” text, which made her feel “awkward, embarrassed and professionally compromised”. He has apologised for making her feel uncomfortable.

She tells the Standard, which counts a number of her friends among the columnists:

“I am pretty concerned about anonymity for those accused, particularly of sexual harassment,” she said [sic] because what we know in all of these cases is it is almost always the case that someone accused, plausibly, of sexual harassment is a serial offender, and that when one woman makes a complaint, others are finally emboldened to do so.”

Why can’t the accusation be examined on its merits? Why do we need a group to bring the accused down? Isn’t assuming that one accusation is the thin edge of the wedge, prejudicial to a fair hearing? How does trial by media achieve justice?

Ms Maltby said: “This working group is clearly a step in the right direction. I think there is a lot still to be hammered out.”

The Standard cites more voices calling for the accused’s name to be made known.

Sophie Walker, leader of the Women’s Equality Party, says: “It’s a concern that the risk of malicious and vexatious complaints features so prominently in this report. None of the allegations that triggered the review were found to have been malicious so having this so high up as an issue to be addressed is misplaced. It triggers all those myths about hysteria and witch-hunts that have been such an unfortunate feature of this issue.”

Isn’t the risk of one innocent being wrongly convicted worth the caution?

Leader of the Commons Andrea Leadsom adds: “This is a big day for Parliament and our politics. It is in the context of this that the confidentiality issue is so concerning. We know that confidentiality can protect victims but it can also be used to protect the guilty and party reputations. The whole Me Too movement has shown just how important public disclosure can be to victims who are otherwise ignored and mistrusted and might not feel confident in coming forward.”

Isn’t that alleged victims, Andrea? Many people who have said #MeToo have yet to have their claims tested in court. Have we not learnt anything from ‘Nick’, the man who claimed to have witnessed MPs murdering children for sexual gratification, whose allegation were branded “credibly and true” by the police, who after such fanfare and trawling found no evidence for any offence?

Let’s stick to the facts and hold people accountable for their actions. But let’s not ruin lives and careers on the strength of an allegation, however morally right and powerful it is.

The police tell. They do not listen. They work to an agenda. Media should not be so monocular. It should exercise circumspection. The police make enough mistakes without any need to sensationalise the ordinary.

The Metro trails as story from a march in London by thousands of Kurds protesting against Turkey’s military attack on the Kurdish city of Afrin in Syria. It’s horrendous. Shame on the UK for not backing the Kurds.

This Metro’s conjures the headline: “Police medic punches man in head at Kurdish rally.” It is “shocking” says the paper of the moment a “Metropolitan Police medic repeatedly punches a man” in the head.

Only, he doesn’t. The copper is hitting the man in the shoulder in what appears to be an attempt to get him to release his grip.

The minor incident was reported earlier in the Mail, which also needs a crash course in body parts:

Met police medic punches man in the head at Kurdish rally. Met police medic punches man in the head at Kurdish rally. A man wearing a Metropolitan police medic uniform has been filmed on top of another man who he punches repeatedly in the head as he lays on the road at a Kurdish protest rally in London.

The Mail adds: “The man tries to get up, without using much force but is pushed back down by the medic, who then punches him in the face four times“. The Mail says that twice.

The face? No. That’s a shoulder.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police says: “We are aware of a video posted on social media. We are in the process of establishing the circumstances of the incident. The Directorate of Professional Standards has been informed.”

We’re aware of it, too, and it’d be stupid to rush to judgement. No context is offered by the video. Just sensationalist reporting.

This week it became a criminal offence for under-18s in Wales to get a pierced tongue, nipple or genitals. The Labour-run Welsh Government heard from, among others, Dr Frank Atherton, the chief medical officer for Wales, who said “a third of young people with intimate piercings have reported complications following a procedure”. The could be “child protection issues”.

Under-18s cannot care for themselves as well as over-18s. Over-18s do not always have under-18s best interests at heart. Although the Welsh Government notes: “A study in England found that amongst individuals aged 16-24 complications were reported with around a third of all body piercings.” So adults are just as likely to report complications with body piercings as under-18s. Why not ban it for everyone, then? Maybe the Welsh Government think one age group is easier to control than the other?

This week week we also learned that the Welsh government plans to allow 16 and 17-year-olds the right to vote in council elections. Sixteen-year-olds are too childish to wash their own tongues but smart enough to vote… well, to vote Labour, which is surely the local burghers’ forecast.

They’re not giving teens the vote because they think you’re whip smart or even want it. They’re giving you the vote because they think you don’t read the label and can’t grasp consequences.

When Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg arrived to speak at the University of the West of England (UWE) event organised by the university’s Politics and International Relations Society, a group of protestors burst in and started bellowing. Some of the fearless hecklers wore darks glasses and scarves over their faces. The Express calls them “masked men”.

Chloe Kaye, who posted a video of the ruckus on Twitter, wrote: “A huge amount of (physical) violence at a Jacob Rees-Mogg speech in UWE Bristol.” She tells the Express: “I went into the talk to hear about Jacob Rees-Mogg and suddenly as soon as he comes in about six masked individuals run in screaming, ‘bigot, racist, sexist’. They’re screaming, absolutely no university security to be seen. Jacob Rees-Mogg screams, ‘I believe in free speech,’ so he runs up to them and actually wants to start talking to them.”

They also called him a Nazi, which says much about their thin grasp on history and what actual Nazis are.

Only the Guardian offers some reason why the uninvited guests went for Rees-Mogg:

The Conservative MP for North East Somerset, tipped by some as his party’s next leader, is seen as a divisive figure because of his rightwing views, including hardline Euroscepticism, opposition to abortion even in cases of rape, and his belief that climate change is not worth fighting.

He’s a committed Catholic. Raus! No Catholics here. He has strong views. And he understands that holding them will attract fierce reactions. But to be slated for being a Catholic is abhorrent. And you know who else didn’t much like Catholics?

The Guardian branded Rees-Mogg a bigot on its front page, but not the Pope, nor any number of people from other religions that don’t support abortion and gay marriage, such as leaders in Iran, where homosexuals are executed – Iran’s a bigoted regime that used to hire Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn through Press TV.

The Pope – the right kind of ‘bigot’

There was a scuffle. Rees-Mogg was jostled. Although sources say he was trying to break up a fight between the “anti-fascists” who, er, don’t like free speech and those who’d got a ticket to hear him speak.

“Some people who don’t agree with me wanted to make their point, and I don’t object to this,” said the MP. “I think we live in a free society and freedom of speech is very important. And people like me, who advocate freedom of speech, support it when it’s not exactly what we want, as well as when it is what we want.”

“They shouted at me, but they weren’t going to hit me,” he adds. “They didn’t want to talk about politics, they just wanted to stop the event. I’m of the sticks-and-stones school of thought,” he said. “I wanted to stop anyone being hit because the whole thing would have degenerated. I didn’t think anyone was going to hit me so I felt quite safe intervening. I spoke afterwards; I was there for ages.”

The Labour Party is unfit for purpose. Nora Mulready is relinquishing her Labour membership after 20 years:

In recent weeks, Labour could not make a simple statement in support of those protesting for freedom in Iran. It couldn’t give a straightforward condemnation of a regime that stones people to death for adultery, publicly hangs gay people, and forces women by threat of criminal punishment to wear headscarves in public. The hard left’s virulent anti-Americanism renders it ‘just not that simple’. No, with the influence and influx of ‘Stop The War’ ideologies, Labour has been dragged so deeply down the rabbit hole of anti-imperialist theories that they cannot condemn dictatorial, theocratic, repressive Iran in case it somehow strengthens, or implies support for, democratic, secular and free America. My Labour would see America is a necessary bulwark against Iran, yet the Labour we have sees Iran as a necessary bulwark against America. I cannot in all good conscience tell a single person to vote for that.

Boris Johnson turned off his watermelon smile and demanded that Jeremy Corbyn slammed the “hard-left mob”adding a dash of righteous spite to tiffin at the Blighty café in London’s Finsbury Park. The Mail focuses on Halimo Hussein, 24, who along with eight other nicely dressed youth called Winston Churchill a “racist” and demanded that anyone with a social conscience boycott the cafe that bills itself:

Welcome to the Blighty Commonwealth of Cafes – originally founded in 1944 by RAF fighter pilot and war hero, Capt Roy Bevans. After years of decline Blighty was resurrected in 2013 by Roys [sic] grandson, Horatio Bevans.

Blighty’s mission is to make the world a closer place by celebrating and improving the relationships between the people and nations of the 52 members of the commonwealth [sic].

We celebrate these relationships via the mediums [sic – come in, Winston; are you there?] of brunch, coffee and community.

Mission:
To make the world a closer place by impoving [sic] the relationships between the people and nations of the commonwealth.

All nations united under a common flag – if not a common language. The typos are what Churchill would have wanted:

Back in the Mail, then, where Halimo Hussein, a politics student and “co-president of Equality and Liberation at SOAS, University of London”, is eschewing Vera Lynn staples to chant: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” No, not just coffee chains. Virtual and possibly actual chains.

Once inside the cafe, which they “stormed” (Express, Sun, Mail, Russia Today, Daily Mirror) by, er, walking though the door, the group read from a prepared script:

Protestor One: “We cannot accept the unashamed colonial and gentrifying presence of this cafe’ before the group chanted ‘You will never make colonialism palatable.”

Ms Hussein: “To the owner of the cafe, apologise to the local community for their poorly thought and insensitive branding and promptly change it from the menu to the aesthetics and décor of the cafe.”

Protestor Three: ‘To the customer, we ask you that you boycott this cafe until they take the concerns of the community seriously'”

Boris Johnson took time out from his busy schedule as Foreign Secretary to opine: “Disgraceful attack on our finest ever wartime leader by hard-left mob. Jeremy Corbyn should denounce the actions of these ‘activists’ immediately.”

Jack Lopresti, the Conservative MP for Filton and Bradley Stoke, tells the Mail: “This outrageous behaviour represents the hard left’s politics which is of the most puerile and ignorant kind. Without the bravery, courage and leadership of Sir Winston Churchill, we would not be living in a free country where we have the freedom to express our personal views, regardless of how, in their case, ridiculous or offensive they are.”

Michael Fabricant, Tory MP for Lichfield, adds: “It is thanks to Winston Churchill that fools like these are able to hold their childish views and not be thrown into a concentration camp. They should think about this before the next time they behave like yobs.”

No Labour MP is quoted.

If that’s not enough, the Mail says Ms Hussein, “an avid Labour supporter and Jeremy Corbyn fan” – how do you square Corbyn’s support for Iran with your anti-imperialism? – has “left a scathing online review of the cafe which read: ‘Bland breakfasts and awful watery tasting coffee’.” Just as the British like their grub. Toss in some nylon sheets, atmospheric smog and clanking radiators, and the Blighty cafes could run a fleet of hotels. (Note to owners: call me, I have ideas; and think of about changing the French sounding ‘cafes’ to something more British, like ‘dining rooms’, ‘shed’ or ‘billet’).

If you want to see what Donald Trumps did or didn’t see you can catch aid to masturbation Stormy Daniels at The Trophy Club in Greenville, South Carolina, tomorrow.

The show is part of Daniels’ “Making America Horny Again Tour”, her entrepreneurial reaction to the Wall Street Journal’s claim that Trump paid her $130,000 to keep quiet about an alleged shag. In 2009 In Touch magazine reported Daniel’s story about her alleged sex with Trump.

A strange burst of statistics in the Telegraph, which publishes words from a parliamentary debate on a minimum unit price on alcohol. We learn that “just 4 per cent of the population consume almost one-third of all the alcohol sold in England”.

Is that unfair – should booze be more evenly distributed; and should there be more alcohol so that we can all drink more?

Rosanna O’Connor, director of Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco at Public Health England (PHE) aims to explain: “Around 4.4 per cent of the population are drinking just under a third of the alcohol consumed in this country. That’s around 2 million drinking just over 30 per cent of the alcohol.”

The greedy sods. More booze for everyone! No, no. This is about health. It’s also about preventing the poor from drinking as much as the wealthy by making booze more expensive. It’s prohibition for the mentally negligible.

The Scottish government thinks that by setting a minimum price for alcohol it will cut the amount consumed. The surcharge goes to the retailer. It’s not a tax. The cash will compensate the vendor for loss of sales. Here’s an example:

A lower limit of 50p per unit of alcohol would put the minimum price of a four-pack of 4% ABV lager at £3.52, while a bottle of 12.5% ABV red wine could not be sold for less than £4.69.

The middle-class drinker won’t notice the hike as much as the less well off drinker, who buys the cheap, high-strength alcohol. The poor and thirty drinkers will either have to drink less or raise more funds for their booze by, say, getting a job as a hedge fund manager, a football agent, engaging in some other nefarious activity or running a booze train to England.

Ever wonder what sex with Donald Trump is like? There might be bedwetting and orange skids on the sheets. But what about the actual intercourse? Lending Trump watchers and other enthusiastic sex watchers a small moistened helping hand is Stormy Daniels, a pneumatic aid to masturbation who tells us via a 2011 edition of In Touch magazine that sex with Trump in 2006 was “textbook”.

Stormy in a G-Cup

In most of my school textbooks, sex was depictions of gigantic breasts and squirting knobs drawn in the margins. In Stormy’s edition of York Notes, we get more words than images:. “I actually don’t even know why I did it,” says the porn star of the billionaire, “but I do remember while we were having sex I was like, ‘Please don’t try to pay me’.” Well, d’uh. For one thing, where’s she’s gonna swipe the credit card?

She says he asked her to sign a DVD of one of her skin flicks and called her a “smart businesswoman” before they parted.

Anyhow, this is news because Trump says they never shagged. And she agrees, also stating that in no way was she paid $130,000 to never mention the incident.

A few weeks ago, relatively few of us would have known the name of UKIP’s current leader. But then he left his third wife – the mother of his two young children, 42-year-old Tatiana Smurova – shacked up with a much younger woman, and because news media love blondes – which the lover is – the name Henry Bolton is now hard to avoid. Harder still to miss than the man who looks like a spin-dried Harry Enfield is the blonde, a “topless model” (Mirror) and UKIP member called Jo Marney.

She’s a deliciously dislikable character who after fire took the lives of so many at Grenfell Tower, opined: “Disgusting. That entire tower was a nest of illegal immigrants of all varieties. That’s why they can’t identify most of them. Meanwhile, British families wait on the council housing list for years.”

Other bon mosts include, according to the Sun: “Eastern European s****’ who would ‘f*** a mangey dog for about 10 quid and a Big Mac”. The Mail “can reveal Miss Marney has plumbed even further depths with horrific messages in which she joked with a friend about raping a baby. The Mail has chosen not to print the distressing exchange.”

Which makes us wonder what it was. But no matter if it was “taken out of context” and had been “part of an outrage competition”, which someone billed as Marney’s “friend” tells the Mail it was, what really made Marney fly were her ugly words on Meghan Markle, Prince Harry’s intended:

Of course, they were private messages, a point Marney makes as she speaks to the Mail:

“I’m absolutely devastated by the messages that I’ve sent and the distress that I’ve caused anyone by those messages. They were unnecessary, they were reckless, they were overly exaggerated purely for effect. They were never intended to be put in the public domain and I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere and deepest apologies to anyone I’ve hurt and for the distress and embarrassment I’ve caused my family, friends and the party.”

And news just in. Henry Bolton has dumped Jo Marney, leaving her free to pursue a carer as a shock jock on LBC.

When, as reported everywhere, Democratic Senator Dick Durbin said Donald Trump called Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries (none of which have been identified) “shitholes” in an other instalment of his soap opera presidency. Trump’s beef, allegedly, is that immigrants are coming to the US from “shithole countries”. He’d rather aspirational people seeking better lives came from countries he admires, like Norway.

Many people were upset.

Trump denied it:

“I cannot believe that in the history of the White House, in that Oval Office, any president has ever spoken the words that I personally heard our president speak yesterday,” countered Mr Durbin.

Did Trump call African countries and Haiti “shitholes”? And if he did, is that really the worst thing any US President has ever said?

Actor John Cusack was among the upset:

Or as John Cusack out it in 2012: “One is forced to asked the question: Is the President (Obama) just another Ivy League A**hole shredding civil liberties and due process and sending people to die in some sh**hole for purely political reasons?”

Is Toby Young a eugenicist? Young has been riding high on the news cycle ever since we was given a job at the Office for Students (OfS). People held up Young’s offensive tweets and, depending on your prejudices, either hounded him from a job he was well-equipped to perform or exposed a pervert who benefitted from friends and family in high places to score a job he was unfit for. Under pressure, Young resigned from the position.

Prejudice has played a part in Young’s undoing, of course. Labour MP Angela Rayner wanted Young banned from the OfS for his “historical comments”. That’s the same Rayner who supported her fellow Labour MP Jared O’Mara, the charmer who labelled his fellow humans “sexy little slags”, “poofters” and “fudge-packers”. Angela Rayner told the BBC’s Today Programme: “I am happy to sit alongside him, because he made those comments 15 years ago… People do change their views…it is important that they recognise that and apologise and correct that behaviour.”

And what of Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, who called Tory MP Esther McVey a “stain on humanity”? He mused: “Why aren’t we lynching the bastard?” Emily Thornberry, the shadow foreign secretary, has described Mr Young – who apologised “unreservedly” for previous “ill-judged” comments – as “horrible”. Appearing on BBC Radio 5Live, Thornberry was asked if she believed Mr McDonnell should apologise. “I think that those who remember what it was that she [McVey] said around the time that she was cutting benefits to disabled people will be horrified to hear that she is now the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.”

Isn’t that, you know, victim blaming?

What of death threats aimed at McVey following McDonnell’s attack? “Well, that is wrong but what she needs to do is she needs to ensure that she educates herself properly about what the effects of cuts to benefits have on real people on a day to day basis,” said Thornberry, who saw no need for McDonnell to apologise.

And there’s more. On the BBC’s Question Time last night, the matter of Young’s attendance at a get together called the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) at UCL was raised. The London Student Coopsite highlights some of the matters discussed there: “The London Conference on Intelligence, is dominated by a secretive group of white supremacists with neo-Nazi links.,, Among the speakers and attendees over the last four years are a self-taught geneticist who argues in favour of child rape, multiple white supremacists, and ex-board member of the Office for Students Toby Young.”

Private Eye says the conference “serves as a rendezvous for academic racists and their sympathisers”.

Yes, I heard some people express some pretty odd views. But I don’t accept that listening to someone putting forward an idea constitutes tacit acceptance or approval of that idea, however unpalatable. That’s the kind of reasoning that leads to people being no-platformed on university campuses.

Fair point, no? If attending equates to approval, what of working for the Iranian regime? Nick Cohen noted:

Jeremy Corbyn has been paid £20,000 to appear five times on the totalitarian Iranian regime’s propaganda channel, which was banned in the UK for its role in filming the tortured forced-confession of Iranian liberal journalist Maziar Bahari… Iranian democracy campaigner Maziar Bahari’s own thoughts on Corbyn, who he describes as ‘a useful idiot’, and goes on to say:

People who present programmes for Press TV and get paid for it should be really ashamed of themselves — especially if they call themselves liberals and people who are interested in human rights.

The Iranian regime executes gay people, democracy activists, Kurds, and orders the rape of female prisoners. But Corbyn is happy to take their money and aid their propaganda campaign. Watch the end of this clip as Jeremy hosts a caller who describes the BBC as having hosted ‘Zionist liars’.

And what of inviting Hamas and Hizbollah to Parliament? Corbyn called them his “friends”. That’s Hamas which calls for all Jews to be killed and states:

Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement… There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad.

Double standards? Of course. That much is certain.

And as for eugenics being, as Question Time panelist comedian Nish Kumar called it “some dark Nazi shit”, well, not all eugenicists are Nazis. There’s Marie Stopes, the family-planning pioneer, who in a book called Radiant Motherhooddenounced any society that “allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped and inferior infants.” Helen Keller said that allowing a “defective” child to die was simply a “weeding of the human garden that shows a sincere love of true life.” In 1910, ardent socialist George Bernard Shaw’s lecture to the Eugenics Education Society was reported in the Daily Express: “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”

Polly Tonybee, who like Bernard Shaw did, writes for the Guardian, also forgets history. Does she forget that the Fabian society once advocated eugenics? The Fabian Society, as the Guardian notes, “joined with the trade unions to found the Labour party”. Says Tonybee in that paper:

Despite the non-emergence of an “intelligence gene” and the predominant importance of environment over heredity, the far right’s search for reasons why the poor are inferior has a long history. Steve Jones, renowned geneticist, puts it this way: he points out that wealth is considerably more heritable than genes. He says moving to affluence increases a working-class child’s IQ by 15 points. As for super-breeding, Darwin asked a racing dog breeder how he succeeded: “I breed many and I hang many,” was his reply. Not so easy with humans.

Young’s New Schools Network is an odd beast, a charity drawing £2m, 90% of its income, from the state, to advocate and help people set up new schools. But there haven’t been any successful applications since before the 2015 election.

The closing date for the renewed contract to the NSN is 19 January – though it has always gone to the same outfit. Toby Young earns some £90,000 per year as its head. There is, in the tender, no mention of applicants being fit and proper – or non-eugenicists.

…the worst thing about this days-long, now successful demand for a metaphorical head on a platter is that it will intensify one of the nastiest strains in British politics right now: the urge to purify public life; the thirst for harrying and hectoring and shaming out of polite and political society anyone who isn’t fully au fait with PC-speak, who isn’t completely versed in the new and prudish sexual strictures, who doesn’t believe that men can become women, who thinks it’s okay to make jokes about things, and who isn’t an obedient bower and scraper before the worldview of a staggeringly narrow but sadly influential section of society. Toby Young’s fate confirms the intellectual straitjacketing of public life, and the borderline criminalisation of eccentric, daring or simply daft thought and speech.

If we’re all being judged by people so certain they are right and another is wrong – people who have stopped arguing with themselves and now occupy a settled position where disturbance is taboo, differing views must be destroyed and uncertainly, that force that creates ideas and humour, is ended – an essential part of what it is to be human dies. In which case, can please hurry up with those robots…

Donald Trump watches a channel that only shows gorillas fighting. It’s true. We read it on Twitter. Pixelated Boat, the self-styled “Prince of Lies”, shared an extract from Michael’s Wolff’s book on the President, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House:

“On some days he’ll watch the gorilla channel for 17 hours straight,’ an insider told me. ‘He kneels in front of the TV, with his face about four inches from the screen, and says encouraging things to the gorillas, like ‘the way you hit that other gorilla was good.’ I think he thinks the gorillas can hear him.’”

We know it’s true because no sooner had “Prince of Lies” tweeted it than the New York Times broadcast it as fact:

Newsweek had more.

The Atlantic’s contributing editor Shadi Hamid hooted:

“This is my favorite part of Wolff’s book so far. Amazing for what it says about this administration! (It’s worse than you think!!). So amazing, I can barely even believe it. It’s *literally* incredible.”

Even more incredible than Pixelated Boat’s previous Tweet to the Gorilla TV news:

David Burge nails it: “is that the gorilla turned out to be Trump and the stupid gorilla-obsessed Trump turned out to be the media.”

Nora Mulready wonders why Labour is not upset by the uprising in Iran. She points us to a letter written by the leader of the Workers Communist Party of Iran written to Jeremy Corbyn, formerly a presenter on the Iranian State’s Press TV. She notes: “Well worth reading. Remember, communists & students started 1979 revolution & were butchered by Islamists at end. Takes real courage, not dinner party grandstanding, to be a communist in Iran.”

To: Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of the Labour Party

7 January 2018

Dear Mr Corbyn

In solidarity with the heroic struggle of the people of Iran against one of the most despotic, brutal, anti-working class and misogynistic regimes in the world, and on behalf of the largest working-class party of the left opposition in Iran, I am writing to ask you to distance yourself immediately from the disgraceful comments made yesterday by the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Emily Thornberry. I am asking you to break your silence and to come out unreservedly on the side of the people in Iran in their heroic struggle against their oppressors.

Siding with the oppressors of the people or even staying silent or prevaricating on the rightful protests by the workers, women and the youth in Iran against the corrupt and reactionary Islamic Republic, whose leaders have amassed billions, while subjecting workers to abject poverty, smashing workers’ organisations, throwing trade unionists to jail, committing state-sanctioned discrimination and violence against women and LGBT people and executing dissidents in their tens of thousands, would be a grave political folly for the Labour Party. Once this regime is overthrown by the ongoing heroic rising of the people, the people of Iran will not forget who was on their side and who sided with their oppressors.

Your declared aims of fighting for a better world, for economic equality and for social justice won you great following among millions of people in Britain and internationally, who enthusiastically supported you in your leadership campaigns and in the 2017 general election on a progressive platform to address the widening inequality and the growing injustice in the UK.

However, these are exactly the same issues – on a far harsher and more brutal scale – that have brought millions of people onto to the streets of Iran today. The workers, women and youth in Iran are protesting against grotesque levels of inequality, lack of basic political and social freedoms and a medieval religious dictatorship that is an affront to the collective conscience of humanity in the 21st Century. People in Iran do not want the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the 1% and the billionaire clergy while they try to survive on a minimum wage that is one-fourth of the official poverty line. They do not want the vile state discrimination against women, which officially defines them as minors and the property of their male guardians; they do not want compulsory veiling and gender apartheid. They do not want the imposition of a religious state and religious thought. In one word, the people of Iran do not want the Islamic Republic. They have risen up against the Islamic Republic because they want economic equality and political and social freedoms. They want a better world and a life worthy of human beings. They are right to demand this, and should have the people of the world’s unreserved support.

Siding with such an obnoxious regime and disgracefully declaring, as Emily Thornberry has, that it is not clear who is right or wrong in this struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors will forever stay in the memory of the people of Iran. It will seriously harm the credentials of a progressive and egalitarian party that you are trying to build. It will disillusion millions of your supporters who rushed to your support precisely because they believe in equality and social justice everywhere. It will alienate your grassroots from the leadership, and mark a shameful moment in the life of your new party. It will be an irredeemable political folly and a historic moral disgrace for the Labour Party.

I hope the utterances of Emily Thornberry were an isolated case, which she will come to regret and openly apologies for. In any case, I urge you, as the Leader of the Labour Party, to distance yourself in the clearest terms from those comments and to come out unreservedly and unambiguously on the side of the people of Iran in these momentous days.

In 2009, Donald Trump said his ideal running mate would be Oprah Winfrey. The actress used her acceptance speech for receiving a lifetime achievement gong at the Golden Globe Awards to tell a room full of her peers (including the cheaters, narcissists and SADOS – Sons and Daughters of Stars ) that the time for social change for nigh. Oprah for President, came the media response. and the job is surely hers should she give away a free car with every vote.

But the idea was not of the media’s making. In 2009, Donal Trump told us that Oprah would be his dream deputy:

“Oprah would always be my first choice… I’ll tell ya, she’s really a great woman, though. She is a terrific woman. She’s somebody that’s very special… If she’d do it, she’d be fantastic… She’s popular. She’s brilliant. She’s a wonderful woman. If she’d ever do it, I don’t know if she’d ever do it… She’d be sort of like me. I mean, I have a lot of things going, she’s gotta a lot of things going.”

In 2010, Online MBA produced a porn infographic. It claimed to know that 70% of men visited porn sites in a given month. Dan Savage, a Seattle-based sex columnist, had a word on the demographics of porn watchers. “All men look at porn, ” he stated. “The handful of men who claim they don’t look at porn are liars or castrates.”

Speaking to Vox in an interview about how Google data proves that most Americans lie about their sexual preferences, the researcher and author of “Everybody Lies” asserts… “Porn featuring violence against women is also extremely popular among women…It is far more popular among women than men. I hate saying that because misogynists seem to love this fact,” he added. “Fantasy life isn’t always politically correct.”

In 2014, the US Public Religion Research Institute, said 29 percent of Americans think watching porn is morally acceptable. That’s a lot of people feeling guilty about watching other people having sex.

Which brings us to news that the burghers of Westminster are not like the rest of us:

Staff working in Parliament tried to access online pornography once every nine minutes in the last couple of months, despite a crackdown on inappropriate sexual behaviour, new figures show.

More than 24,000 attempts were made to get onto adult websites from inside the Parliamentary estate – around 160 requests per day – although most were blocked.

Users on the Parliamentary network, including MPs, peers, staff and contractors, used their devices to try and connect to banned content almost 25,000 times in just four months.

Is that a lot?

At the end of January 2015, the headcount of the number of people employed by the House of Commons was 2,040

Add on 650 MPs, 800 Lords, their staff and media workers, and you can add another, say, 2000 people to the Westminster head count. Given the figures supplied for the popularity of porn, Westminster looks relatively clean.